My name is Paul Greer, I work full time at BDH, making computer animation for the telly.
This is my main blog with news, work updates, new drawings, stories, comics, notebook pages, how tos, animations and link dumps. My more impulsive internet scrapbook is here.
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Here is a short trailer for the animations we made for the forthcoming documentary War of Words: Soldier Poets of the Somme. In remembrance of those lost.
There is a lot of us in this.
Will let you know when more is available.
Have a beautiful evening.
x
(T)
I thought I would start posting these sketched here directly, as well as on Instagram. It gives me more free reign to add rambling thoughts afterwards.
Drawn without looking. I went in quite hard with the snapseed as you can tell.
Pencil. Notebook: Ethel
Here’s the previous one:
74/365 Various people on Whiteladies Road. Pencil and V-ball. Notebook: as-yet-still-untitled
..and to add insult to injury two of these I have already posted here. But in the spirit of complete-ism and putting everything down this blog pipe, here we are.
Notebooks Zebulon (9 x 14 pocket Moleskine) and Leonidas (8 x 11 homemade pocket book) are now retired (so you can see I do continue to use them, it’s just most of the content is not suitable for posting in the internet (and I mean that in a nice way)). Ethel (13 x 21 Moleskine) is still going strong, and is what I am mainly using for writing, mapping, drawing, general ranting and work. I also have a new shiny currently un-named homemade pocket book. I’m sticking with just the two for now, as I’m currently liking seeing the consistency and flow in build up in Ethel, and I obviously need a smaller pocket book that I can be a Everyday Carry type object for emergencies.
(above from a week or so ago) Notebook Zebulon is close to the end. But there are a few corners not filled with indecipherable tiny writing.
A few items are coming to a head, at BDH one large project at work is being broadcast at the moment and the Very Large Animation job we did earlier in the year is on the brink. Also a small personal piece to be published in a new and very exiting way with other stuff that’s much better than mine. The “things planned” part are art things (as opposed to wok things) that I hope to post about here as I progress through them. That involves removing a few shackles of hesitancy on my part. Not to mention my bionically slow progress. But one can only try.
What? Oh, yes sketches, they get pushed to the back of the queue on a daily basis, then I feel bad. But I have to keep reminding myself, NOBODY CARES, so it’s ok. Might also start playing with posting them straight here and pinging them out then putting them on Instagram, instead of the other way around.
Man in shorts and flip flops looking at a Xmas display in the department store. #2014 #sprautumn
At BDH I was recently a small part of the awesomeness that was the CGI and graphics team on The new Professor Brian Cox series Human Universe.
It begins, with the first episode “Apeman-Spaceman” this evening (Tuesday 7th October) on BBC TWO.
We previously worked on the Wonders of the Universe and Wonders of Life with the same team.
A week or so ago I travelled across England to pick up a car. So the away journey was by train and the return by car.
There’s a lot of enforced down time during a trip like that so I took a few photos made a few drawings, read a bit of Vonnegut, thought about stuff. Very enriching in all.
I liked the idea I could sample the sea on opposite coasts in one day. This was not possible on the way there as I was effectively on food and couldn’t get to Clevedon.
So my morning photo of the West that day was this one:
Caught the 11:05 to Paddington, with the express idea of drawing, a possibly trying to catch up on the 365 drawing thing I’ve been going. Not sure if you have tried drawing on a train, most people are too close for you to study without causing a uncomfortable situation and generally stuff is going passed so quickly outside you need a super fast photographic memory to get it in your brain before you can decide how to represent it on the page.
So I decided to go for the horizon, because that goes pass slower and if you miss a bit it doesn’t look too weird if you just join on to the contiuation.
I added the times and locations at points, also a few announcements from the guard to add some
.
I got as far as Didcot Parkway on that then got the I’ll-miss-my-stop-fear, even theough the train was terminating. The connections were really tight as I got a super cheap ticket I had to make everyone.
Managed to take a picture of Yea Olde Saint Pancras as I got to Kings Cross.
Then there I was in the East. It’s quite flat there. We picked up the car somewhere in the middle of the Fens, this is what it is like there.
Mostly sky.
I stayed over night at my folks place. There’s a lot of amazing old photos there. They should write a book.
Here is a picture of my Grandad at a Grasstrack meeting at Bourne in June 1949, less that 4 years after the end of the Second World War. Two Soldiers looking on. (Grandad’s on the left):
So the next day I set off as early as I could (which wasn’t that early), this time because I had wheels I could take a picture of the sea, here known as the Wash. It’s quite shallow there so the sea is often very flat compared to the ocean that crashes in on the West coast.
Wanted to draw on the way back too. But you can’t draw when driving. That is bad. So I took breaks (7 hour drive altogether), and when I took a break I drew the backend of whatever I could see.
I got caught in a nasty jam on the M62 so didn’t get back home until late. But just in time to catch the end of the light in this picture of the opposite Sea.
There’s nothing like the arrival of a new interesting social media thing to get people talking about talking.
Ello kind of blew open this last week, taking the creators by surprise slightly. I got myself and invite from a dear internet friend, and there’s only one way to find out if you look like something. It could be better than bad.
Turns out I do quite like it.
There’s a lot of speculation and discussion as to whether its the Facebook Killer prophecy speaks off, or just another Diaspora. Google+ was a Facebook Killer for about 2 days and that had Google behind it.
You can’t buy cool though.
Ello’s first inhabitants were the creatives, artists, writers and weirdos (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) we all love and adore, there weeks before anyone else. Then, because of it’s most righteous indie web aspirations it also has provided a landing pad for those fleeing Facebook as a result of its banning accounts without users genuine names (immediately alienating large areas of the LGBT community for one).
And they say they won’t advertise at you or sell your data, which is nice, but has many wondering how it will pay for itself, suggesting the big sell out is inevitable, or has already happened.
I’m hopeful it won’t. But it does have me wondering why we all just don’t post to our own sites all the time anyways, instead of socially mediating and handing all our content to someone elses website.
Makes me think I should be using this more.
Maybe I will.
Or maybe I’ll see you on Ello.
(Something that does work nicely on Ello is gifs, the one above is over 2mb and it went up and played no problem).
The building work began this week and the many weeks of hard work clearing the garage and the existing extension ready for demolition payed off as we put the last box of random items that didn’t fit anywhere else into the car minutes before the demolition of part of the house began.
I’m not sure what our ratio for reduction was, we had some storage space, we sold a lot, assimilated various bits into the rest of the house and into the shed, but there was a lot that we had to lose.
It was very much a loaded process for us as each item seemed to hold another branching tree of memories. One example being a cardboard box which we had been keeping some paper work in, once cleared I picked it up ready to dismatle it for recycling, only to read the label and find it was the box that delivered the toys for my eldest’s first birthday, many years ago.
Notes from lost loved ones, postcards from the other sides, keep sakes from when we had time to keep stuff.
Some of the most difficult things to go through were artwork of various kinds. Especially the children’s, we have three so there were large quantities which we had to reduce or else we would not have had any room to live.
Then there was our own artwork, a constant stream of surprises, as we discovered forgotten box after forgotten portfolio. We tried a loss rate of 2:1 (thus keeping about a third of what we had).
So I was quite pleased with myself when I managed to reduce a very large plastic container of art, comics, notebooks, animation drawings into this suitcase.
It’s nice to lose some of the lazy stuff I could see in there, you could easily tell if a hand was drawn from looking properly or just drawing an approximation of a hand preprogrammed in.
I’m reasonably pleased with what is left.
I suppose I ought to digitize some of this stuff and put it on the site here. If it stands up.
Speaking of standing up, the garage this picture was takenin just a few days ago isn’t anymore.
Exciting times.
Paul Greer 